Tower Climber (A LitRPG Adventure, Book 1) by Jakob Tanner (free children's online books TXT) 📕

Ability Slot: Shadow Blink (Rare)

Strength: 13

Agility: 13

Endurance: 11

Mana Affinity: 11

Passive Skills:

Kokoro (Warrior Spirit)

Look at all those stats increasing, thought Max with satisfaction.

A lot of the other student climbers who were also training in the forest in preparation for the midterms thought he was crazy. He was always the first one there in the morning and the last one to leave. Now that he wasn’t even fighting monsters and just training, they thought his level of determination bordered on insane. They’d never seen anything like it. Max could see their astonishment every time he jogged past them or they came by him doing push-ups in the forest.

But it was all worth it, he thought.

When there was only about a week and a half until the midterms, Max woke up to a text message from Casey.

“Hey! How goes midterm training? Want to meet up for coffee?”

Max held the phone in his hand and paused as he read over the message once more. It wasn’t that odd to be hearing from her, was it? They did exchange phone numbers for this very reason. But wasn’t Casey training extra diligently for the midterms as well? Could they really just hang out at a café all afternoon? But then again: he hadn’t been very productive the last few days anyway, what was one more day of hanging out?

Also, if he recalled correctly, Casey said they should hang out if either one of them stumbled across something important about the midterms.

Maybe that was why she was texting him.

Either way, he wasn’t going to find out anything until he spoke to her.

He texted her back and they arranged a time to meet the next day.

The following afternoon, they met at a café downtown in the heart of the tower-zone.

Casey sat in the back drinking a matcha latte.

He ordered a simple black coffee and joined her at the table.

“Where’s Toto,” asked Max.

As if it had heard its name, the girl’s pet gerbil poked its head out of Casey’s pocket.

“Shh!” said Casey. “You’re not allowed pets in here.”

She crumbled off a bit of her biscotti and handed it to Toto as bribery to go back into hiding deep within her hoodie’s pocket. The gerbil picked up the cookie crumb which looked gigantic between its little hands and nestled itself away out of sight.

“Toto loves cookies,” giggled Casey. “So do I!”

Max took a sip of his black coffee. He wanted to ask why she had invited him here, but he figured there was no way to straight up ask that without sounding like a total jerk.

“How is your mid-term training going?” Casey finally asked.

Max had thought about how much he was going to tell Casey on the way here and he figured he had nothing to hide from her.

“I ranked up,” he said.

“You hit E-rank!?” she gasped. “You’ve only been in the tower-zone for a couple of months and you’re already at E-rank? It took me almost two years to get to E-rank and I’m still nowhere close to getting up to D-rank. That’s incredible, Max.”

He smiled. He was pretty pleased with himself for ranking up, but he also kept his ego in check. Casey ranked up without going up to the endless forest. No wonder it took ages. She must have had to practice mana channeling every day, maybe even save up to buy a silver monster core. It wouldn’t have been easy; but then she and the rest of the students at the climber academy besides him had years to get there. He had to play catch-up and exploit any advantage he had.

“Congratulations are now over though,” said Casey, her eyes suddenly getting serious. “That’s right, wipe that ‘I’m-the-greatest’-look off your face, because you’re not going to like what I say next.”

Max suddenly straightened up in his chair.

You’re not going to like what I say next. What could that be about? What did she know that he didn’t?

“Go on,” said Max.

Casey grinned.

She took another sip of her matcha latte and dropped another biscotti crumb into her pocket for Toto.

“Tell me, Max, have you only been training your stats this entire time?”

Max nodded. Of course that was what he had been doing. It’s what all the students were doing. How else were they going to train for the midterms.

“See, that’s what I was doing too,” said Casey. “But then I thought about it for a second. Why did they give us so much independent study just to train?”

Max grinned, picking up on where she was going. “You mean: it’s a test within a test.”

“Exactly,” she smiled. “Sure, training might help you pass the midterms, but you know what would be even more of a guarantee? Actually knowing what the mid-term test was going to look like. That way you could really prepare.”

“Good thinking, Casey,” said Max.

He was slightly irritated that he hadn’t thought of this himself. He’d been so focused on ranking up and gaining in power that he’d lost sight of the hidden message within the assignment of the midterms.

“So we have a week until midterms,” said Max. “How are we going to find out what the test is?”

Casey grinned widely.

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “I already found out.”

56

“How did you find out?” said Max.

“It was easy,” she said. “I actually don’t think they wanted finding out to be super difficult. The test within the test wanted to see if you were clever enough to explore researching the test itself as an option. Anyway, I just climbed a tree and used my trait to blow out some papers from one of the academy windows.”

“Genius,” said Max.

“Both Toto and I agree,” she grinned, dropping another cookie crumb into her pocket.

Max was seriously impressed. Casey was probably ahead of every other student right now in terms of passing the test. There was just one question he couldn’t quite understand.

“So why are you telling me?” he said.

“We made a deal,” she shrugged.

“We’re all technically in competition with each other, are we not?”

“Yeah, but there’s obviously